SaGol: Using MiniGPT-4 to Generate Alt Text for Improving Image Accessibility

SaGol is an AI-powered application to improve image accessibility for people with visual impairments (PVI) users. Alternative (alt) text, a general method of web accessibility for PVI users, is text or phrases that describe images on a website in an understandable way. SaGol generates alt text with the images on the user's smartphone using a vision large language model called MiniGPT-4. SaGol searches for similar images based on the generated alt text. We evaluated the length of alt text and the search accuracy. This paper shows a potential opportunity to improve image accessibility for PVI users.